Did you know that there was a time when potatoes were illegal in France?
So much for the french fry.
And it wasn't until this man Parmentier restored their good name that potatoes became the food of the people during the French Revolution.
So today we'll be making one of the first legal potato recipes in France from the French Revolution.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video as we make potatoes from the French Revolutino
this time on Tasting History.
Today's recipe comes from the first and perhaps only cookbook written and printed in Paris during the French Revolution.
It's called 'La Cuisiniere Republicaine' written in the third year of the republic
which could be 1794 or it could be 1795 because the French Republican calendar is very confusing,
and it starts at the Autumnal Equinox so I'm very glad that it only stuck around for a little bit over a decade.
Now the author of the cookbook is a Madame Merigot and we don't really know much about her,
other than she was the wife of a Paris bookseller but she was a big proponent of the potato,
because all 31 recipes in the cookbook sweet and savory are made with the potato.
"Pomme de terre. When the potatoes are cooked and peeled, mash them well with a wooden spoon,
make a minced meat boiled or roasted. Put in a little butter, salt, pepper, parsley, chives chopped shallots, one or two eggs.
Put your potatoes in as large a quantity as you have minced meat, mix everything together,
medium-sized balls. Dip them in a little egg white that you have reserved from those you have used,
flour them and fry them; serve them garnished with parsley or with a sauce."
So it's essentially meat and potatoes, an entire meal wrapped up into one little package
just like the meals that you'll get from today's sponsor Hellofresh.
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Now getting back to our recipe Madame Merigot was not very specific in the quantities that she needed you to use
to make the recipe so everything is kind of up to your taste but this is what I used:
about two pounds or one kilo of potatoes, and you want something nice and starchy like a yukon gold or a russet.
One pound or 450 grams of cooked meat
and the kind of meat that you use is really up to you but the implication
is that it's leftovers. it's the roast that you had last night that now you're taking and chopping up into mincemeat.
Three tablespoons or 45 grams of butter, a quarter cup of parsley, a quarter cup of chives,
and a quarter cup of shallots. Again you can play with those amounts however you like
but they should be minced up very small to make them incorporate into the meat all the better.
Now when it comes to the salt and pepper again that's up to your taste and it's really going
to depend on if the meat that you're using was previously salt and peppered so start with maybe
one to two teaspoons of each and work your way up from there.
Two eggs separated and a bowl of sifted flour for coating,
and elsewhere she calls out potato flour but since she doesn't call it out here
I'm assuming that she is using wheat flour. Now earlier in the book the author likes like
Samwise Gamgee gives several ways of cooking the po-tay-toes,
but she says that the best way is to boil them in good water so that is what I'm doing,
but I am going to cut them up first because they will boil a lot quicker in about 10 minutes.
I also find that it makes for a fluffier potato,
and while they're boiling mince the meat very fine and frankly you're probably going to want to use a food processor for this
because it needs to be really, really minced very small otherwise it's
not going to work when you're making a ball, you could even use ground meat if you want. It is
going to change the texture a bit but if you're trying to save time ground meat will work.
Then once your potatoes have boiled until they're soft, pour them into a colander and then return the potatoes to the pot and mash them.
Now the goal here is to have the same amount of mashed potatoes as you do minced meat by volume,
but it doesn't need to be exact so just eyeball it.
So put your meat into a large bowl and add in the butter, salt, pepper, parsley, chives, shallots and the two egg yolks,
and mix it all together until everything is well incorporated then add that to the potatoes and mix.
Then take a bit of the mixture and roll it into a ball. They should be a little bit bigger than a golf ball,
much smaller and they'll actually burn when you fry them much bigger and they won't cook all the way through.
Now today something very similar is made in Latin America but they usually
wrap the meat with the potato and then put bread crumbs on the outside and if you are ever
in Southern California and can get to a Porto's Bakery definitely have their potato balls because they're heaven.
Anyway heat two or three inches of lard or oil in a pot on the stove.
You want it to get to about 370 degrees Fahrenheit or 185 Celsius. As it heats whisk the egg white
until it starts to froth and then dip each ball into it and roll it in the flour until fully coated.
Once they're all coated set three or four at a time into the oil and cook for about three minutes.
Then remove them and set them on a wire rack to drain and cool.
I tried doing some without the flour and they actually brown really really nicely but they tend to fall apart
so you gotta use the flour even though it does kind of create a weird outside.
Now today meat and potatoes is kind of a staple of many diets but in 18th century France they were described as
"The pasty flavor, the natural insipidity the unwholesome quality of this food, which like all unleavened starches
is windy and indigestible... send it to the common people, whose coarser tastes and more robust stomachs
are satisfied by everything which is capable of appeasing hunger."
How rude!
Now while we prove this man wrong as we fry up our potato balls make sure to Like this video and make sure you're Subscribed
if you're not already as we travel back in time to a time when potatoes were illegal in France.
Potatoes first came to Europe with the Spanish in the 16th century and by the 18th century they were
being grown most everywhere in Europe but while they were a popular dish in Spain and England and Ireland
most of the continent had yet to really embrace the potato for anything other than
hog feed, to make cheap Swedish brandy, or to eat simply because you had absolutely nothing left to eat.
In fact many farmers believe them to be poisonous to humans and in 1748 in France a fear that they
may cause leprosy led to their cultivation being made illegal
which is somewhat understandable considering that even Mr. Potato Head has trouble keeping his nose from falling off
but further East in Prussia several rulers had tried to get the population to embrace potatoes as
a way to end famine and in 1756 when they wouldn't do so willingly Frederick the Great decided
to mandate it with the Kartofellbefehl or Potato Decree.
"Wherever there is an empty spot to be found, the potato should be grown, as this fruit is not only very useful,
but is so fertile that the effort expended on it will be very well rewarded."
And he was absolutely right, so when the Seven Years War caused mass starvation amongst many of the nations of Europe
the Prussians fared considerably well
and this is where Antoine-Augustin Parmentier enters the potato saga.
See he was a pharmacist for the French Army during the war and was captured and put in a Prussian prison
where he was forced to eat potatoes for the better part of three years.
By the way saying Prussian prison is really, really hard. I said it like five times.
I just want to say Prussian prishon but then I sound like Liza Minnelli.
Anyway when he didn't develop leprosy from eating all these potatoes he figured that
maybe the physicians back in France had made a mistake and that he had just found France's answer to persistent famine.
So in 1763 when he gets back to Paris he is all aboard the potato train. Unfortunately,
he is a single rider because besides still being illegal the potato was caught up in a smear campaign
by prominent economist Francois Quesnay while writing of the financial benefits
of growing certain crops over others, Quesnay says that certain foods including maize and potatoes
grown only by country peasants "scarcely keep men alive while they ruin them physically,
and they cause many to die in childhood. Those who manage to bear up under such a diet,
who preserve their health and their strength, escape from a miserable state,
if they have any sense, by taking refuge in the cities."
Another airtight argument that many of the clergy used against eating potatoes
was that clearly God did not approve of them as they were not mentioned in the Bible.
So clearly Parmentier had an uphill battle ahead of him but he was also up to the task,
and after a failed harvest in 1770
people started to come around to wanting to listen to new ideas.
And Parmentier won an essay contest from the academy of Besancon extolling the virtues of the potato entitled
'Inquiry into Nourishing Vegetables That in Times of Necessity Could Substitute for Ordinary Food'
Not the catchiest of titles nor is putting potatoes in the column of not ordinary food the best marketing but
people didn't seem to care and in 1772 the Paris Faculty of Medicine begrudgingly declared potatoes edible,
and they were once again made legal but just because they were legal didn't mean they were popular.
In fact the hospital where he was a pharmacist Les Invalides
forbade him from planting potatoes in their garden.
Frustrated Parmentier went on the offensive first
with a series of strategic and coordinated dinner parties.
For several years he hosted dinner parties for prominent guests including the American diplomat Benjamin Franklin
and these dinners would have up to 20 courses all featuring the potato.
Then in 1785 he endeavored to get royal support
by presenting King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette with a bouquet of purple potato flowers.
His Majesty was thereafter seen wearing one in his lapel and his Queen wore them in her hair.
So rather than let them eat cake, it should be let them eat potatoes.
In a more practical show of his support King Louis gifted Parmentier several acres outside of Paris where he could grow his potatoes,
and he told Parmentier "France will thank you one day for you have found bread for the poor."
But the poor still had not cozied up to the potato so Parmentier had to think of something else.
First, to make them more coveted he compared potatoes to truffles.
Then he claimed, possibly truthfully, that the land where he was growing potatoes was barren implying that they could grow
pretty much on anyone's farm but still the peasants were skeptical,
and so Parmentier had to think of something to make these potatoes just seem more desirable,
and his later protege and author Julien-Joseph Virey tells us how he did just that.
"Parmentier arranged for gendarmes to guard them- but only during the day.
His intention was for them to be stolen during the night
and the populace did not fail to oblige. Every morning these nocturnal thefts were reported to him;
he was delighted, and generously rewarded the informants, who were astonished by his inexplicable joy.
But public opinion was vanquished and France from that moment was enriched with an enduring resource."
Basically it was only after he put guards around them making them seem very precious
that people actually wanted the potatoes and the same story is often attributed to Frederick the Great,
that Prussian king who made the potato popular in Prussia but my thought is
who would be crazy enough to steal from Frederick the Great?
Fegardless Parmentier continued to write about the many uses of the potato and even had one treatise published and printed by order of the King.
Unfortunately it was done so just a few days before the French Revolution.
AWKWARD
But while the Revolution was bad for Louis it was good for the potato and for Parmentier's career.
In the following years as others took up the mantle for the potato
he focused on abstracting sugar from sugar beets, how to improve the diet of French sailors, and even developed
a more edible version of hardtack.
[Clack Clack]
He also helped create new forms of food refrigeration, started a school for bread making,
and in 1805 under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte Parmentier established the first mandatory smallpox vaccination camapaign.
But as the statue in the Paris Metro station that bears his name attests
and the many dishes named after him it is the potato for which he is remembered.
One contemporary gourmand wrote "Parmentier is the Homer, Virgil and Cicero of the potato."
Something to remember as we try our potatoes from the French Revolution. and here they are pondite
And here they are pomme de terres a l'economie.
Bon appetit.
[Chomp]
Hm!
That's so good.
I mean it's meat and potatoes, with herbs.
It's absolutely delicious. It kind of reminds of the dish
Hachis Parmentier montielle which is named after Parmentier and it's kind of a casserole of meat and potatoes and usually
done with cheese, it's like that but all in one little ball.
Now the meat here is very different because it's not ground meat. It is minced and so it still has a bit
of chew that that ground beef wouldn't have or ground meat wouldn't have,
and so I kind of actually like that there's a little bit- it's not it's not mushy you know this is- it has
more texture to it and as I said before I like a food with texture.
What I would also really like, and I know it's not part of the recipe, but is to add bread crumbs instead of just flour on the outside.
Add some bread crumbs and then you're going to get a crunchiness. Crunchy- crunchiness,
a crunchiness that a lot of modern versions do have because they put bread crumbs on the outside.
Overall absolutely delicious, worth making and I'm probably gonna eat these for dinner.
Also you may have noticed that I have been featuring this wonderful new butcher block that was a gift
from Dr. Gottwoodz Creations and I just wanted to thank them, their work is phenomenal.
They sent me several things including a really cool pizza cutter, handmade
and so now I need to make pizza again, which you know twist my arm, but I just wanted to thank them and I'll
put a link to their Etsy store in the description if you want to check it out their stuff is absolutely fantastic.
So whether you boil them, mash them or stick them in a stew make sure to think of Parmentier
next time you have some potatoes and I will see you next time on Tasting History.